I hate commercials, I’d happily pay a premium for every regular TV station for no commercials on any of ’em, and I say that as someone who doesn’t have much disposable income at all right now. The reason TV commercials suck so much is because they’re unavoidable, ads in other venues, not so much:
(Balloon Juice) — GM has dropped ads on Facebook, saying that they “had little impact” on consumers. When’s the last time you clicked on an Internet ad? … When’s the last time you bought something because it was advertised on the Internet?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere, Facebook is about to go public with a future earnings multiple-of-faith based on that very proposition. I’ve seen a lot of IPOs, handled quite a few hot ones in fact. The earnings model, for lack of a better word, for FB seems awful dicey to me. Then again I once thought the same about a little upstart online company, ticker symbol AMZN, and advised clients accordingly.
I don’t mind commercials, as long as they exist outside of whatever I’m watching. Product placement is getting more and more blatant with scenes in TV shows becoming outright commercials themselves.
Not to mention clunky dialogue that no real person says. “Let me Bing that…”
BBC.
As for ads on websites, I usually install a popup blocker, and more recently I just alias a whole slew of domains to localhost on my personal systems.
I’ve seen some speculation that GM’s announcement was a move to depress Facebook’s IPO – is that at all likely?
Honestly – I can’t believe that ANY advertising gives that much of a ROI these days. We’ve been effectively trained to tune it out, and advertising that gets past our training is typically so loud and obnoxious and irritating that it is more likely to make us upset with the company that uses it instead of interested in whatever they’re trying to sell. The only kind of advertising that gets through to me without being irritating is stuff that is either informative (“I didn’t know something like that existed”), laugh-out-loud amusing by itself, or so freaking weird that it counts as both (see “Snuggie”). If there’s no novelty to the ad, I tune it out automatically.
The only difference I see between Internet ads and other ads is that Internet ads have real metrics – you can see how many folks are influenced by them immediately via click-throughs. TV, radio and other traditional ads don’t have those kinds of metrics so ad agencies can continue to coast on conventional wisdom that everyone needs to advertise.
And how does Progressive insurance afford to have ads on every channel at least 2 times per hour?
Advertisers these days simply thing of adertising as “market share presence”..Making a home in your head until that time you are thinking about a candy bar or a new car.
Also, as our population grows poorer, the net lack of disposable income may begin to affect how advertisers work and what kinds of things supported by advertising will begin to disappear
I mute the TV and read during commercials because I hate them so much. I’ve done it for years and it works (a little too well – I’m always hearing from friends about these great movies I’ve never heard of…because I don’t watch commercials).
Discretionary income not disposable. As for ads, see what dvds you can get at your local library. I can get a season for a show for a buck for assembled at my local library
Back in the days of yore, the selling point for having pay television was that there would not be all these commercials. And we would also have flying cars and moon colonies by now. Remember 2001, flying Pan Am to the moon?
jerthebarbarian says:
I thought so too – until one day (on a whim) I bought a product in which I had previously shown no interest, but just at that moment it seemed like a fun thing to own. As the salesman took my money he said,
“We’ve sold a lot of these lately.”
“How come?” I asked.
“Oh they’re running an advertising campaign on TV”
I had automatically tuned out the advertisements – and they still got to me!
OK, so I’m not the only one wondering how Facebook makes money from ads. I never see ads because of adblocking plugins for Chrome and Firefox. I just assume everyone else uses those too. Even if some people don’t use an adblocker, it still seems like ad revenue has a glaringly obvious Achilles heel.
Do they have Sky Plus where you come from?
It’s a satellite receiver with a built-in HDD video recorder, and two LNB inputs allowing you to watch one programme while recording another (or record two programmes while watching one of them or a recording made earlier). The HDD lets you pause, rewind and fast-forward (up to what has just been broadcast, obviously). All you have to do is pause the show at the beginning, do something else for as long as all the advert breaks will add up to, then start it playing; and because you’re behind what’s being broadcast, you can fast-forward through the adverts.
It’s the only way to watch TV. Even the advert-free BBC benefits from the ability to pause and rewind.
This is true, but ad-blocker have pretty low usage rates.
More importantly, you miss that, at least according to the skim I gave some forms facebook filed related to the IPO, they have at least two other major revenue streams.
1. Revenue from people who make facebook “apps” or “games.” A big chunk of this comes from Zynga (farmville, mob wars et al) but there are many others.
2. demographic information selling
Point two is closely related to their ad business. You can get a lot of leverage in selling advertisements if you can specifically target the audience who you want to show ads to.
However, on a more basic level, facebook has terabytes and terabytes of information about its 200 million some users, their likes, dislikes, what’s going on in their lives right now, the bars, nightclubs and restaurants they like, their social networks.
Properly assembled, collected and analyzed, this is incredibly valuable information.
I, like many of you hate (most) commercials. Some are genius and crack me up, but most of the time it’s a world of pain.
I decided to combat advertisers head-on and stop this torture. A friend and I created an iPhone app so we won’t have to watch commercials at will.
it’s called, … wait for it … “Commercial Break” :)
The idea is simple. You launch the app and select the channel you’re watching. Then when commercial start running, you can zap the TV to a different channel and watch something else. (This is what I usually do when commercials come on). So how do you know when your program is back from the break ? The app sends you a notification!
Then all you have to do is change back to your program, and BOOM, no commercials.
The app is free and ad-free, and we hope to keep it that way for as long as we can fund this project.
We currently support CBS,NBC,ABC and FOX in New York, and ESPN and CNN nation wide, and working on adding more channels.
I’d love to get your feedback and will do my best to add any features and channels you request.
you can download the app for free here:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/commercial-break/id589327264?mt=8
feel free to contact me directly at [email protected]
enjoy!!
– Jamie